Why we all should love RSS. It makes the web higher level without taking anything away. Thanks to Tanya Weiman for observing that this blog started 31 years ago. Probably the longest-running blog on the internets. Still making trouble. And as they say, still diggin. You can always tell how long it's been by looking at the bottom of any archive page, where it's constantly calculating, down to the second, how long this blog has been running. #
Try as hard as I can I still have distinct flows and more than one place where I edit. I think that's a consequence of working on WordLand. I have to use it for serious writing, otherwise how would I know if it works. Maybe I can find a way to merge flows, but not at the moment. I still have to do some copy/pasting. #
- Fascinating blog post from Jason Shellen, tech entrepreneur, formerly with Blogger and Google. Here’s my perspective on part of the story he tells about RSS and Google Reader.#
- Netscape gave us RSS 0.91 and it was good enough to create a new powerful layer on the web. Then Netscape blew up and a bunch of repeated efforts to kill it from big companies. I’ll leave it to others to say why, but they tried over and over to extinguish the spark. Independent developers were stubborn, we kept using the original format, and in the end the independents prevailed. #
- Don’t ever think bigco’s are the answer. They almost always suck the life out of open systems. If you have something good going: work together. It’s the antidote to bigco dominance. #
- If you suck up to the bigco thinking they’ll let you in, maybe they will for a short while. But what you’ll be left with may not be worth the cost. #
- And just because you have a job at a bigco doesn’t make you hot shit. Maybe for a moment. #
- This theory has a name, it’s described in the Prisoner’s Dilemma, and its lesson applies in tech and in the political disaster the US has become.#